For college-age Catholics, Sunday Mass is irrelevant unless celebrated in a caring community and linked to service in the outside world.

That was a principal message which emerged from two four-hour workshops, "Preparing a Liturgy of Justice, Equality and Freedom." Assisted by 15 college students, Jeri Cashman and Tom Conry of the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota used skits, songs, prayer and discussion to explore what's wrong and what can be right in community worship.

University students are not turned off by church issues that aggravate CTA members, like the status of women, the absence of democratic structures or apathy toward real ecumenical cooperation, said Cashman. Rather, they are turned off by the boring, impersonal nature of so much parish worship. Newman Center leader Christine Fox said her home parish experience consisted of the pastor using homilies "to tell us how bad we were and then asking for money." Laura Damm, a University of Wisconsin/Eau Claire student, said she had been unaware there was any kind of Catholicism other than the "top-down, cut-and-dried-answers" variety she experienced at her parish until she began attending Mass at the Newman Center. Jennifer Robey said she had shunned worship at her home parish because the pastor managed to turn the Sunday readings, regardless of the subject, into condemnations of abortion. Jeff Reither, a student intern at the Newman Center, said he, along with most of his Catholic contemporaries, strayed from Sunday Mass during their early years at college because for the first time parental pressure was inoperative and "we were masters of our own domain." Reither said his own insights about college students (including his Top 10 Reasons why they don't go to Mass) come from an informal poll he conducted at the U. of Minnesota where, he said, only a handful of the estimated 30,000 Catholics enrolled attend Mass.

The Newman Center has taken steps to alter the pattern through a catechizing process that presents Scripture as a radical message calling people from passivity and ignorance to action that changes things. Students reclaim the message of Jesus and connect it through the liturgy with life in the real world. Biblical themes like creating order out of chaos, the equality of men and women, and the call for justice are reiterated and reinterpreted in a variety of creative ways.

Out of this, said Fox, have come a host of student-sponsored activities like the ministry to prison inmates, a food pantry and a soup kitchen. Reither spoke of other programs including the Urban Plunge and even leaf-raking for elderly homeowners. Young people, the presenters agreed, will stay alienated from the church until the connection between worship and justice is made patently clear. The enthusiasm of the group, stemming in no small measure from the supportive exuberance of Cashman and Conry, had a contagious effect on participants. The only downside of the Newman Center experience is what happens after graduation. Said one participant, "I've been searching for a living community since I've been out of school and keep hitting my head against a wall. I almost wish I hadn't had the experience (at the Newman Center) in the first place."

Others proposed practical solutions: Support good parishes wherever they exist; sometimes the best justice-centered liturgies occur in the poorest parishes among the minorities and marginalized. Do something now by initiating conversations with like-minded individuals. Or make liturgies happen where you already are and stop begging for permission.